


all they had to lend

by gogollescent



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-12
Updated: 2017-01-12
Packaged: 2018-09-17 00:29:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,325
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9296258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gogollescent/pseuds/gogollescent
Summary: From a few hundred feet up, the swan-ships could be seen to hesitate.





	

From a few hundred feet up, the swan-ships could be seen to hesitate. They darted ahead, lagged and fanned out, taking separate paths to harvest Manwë’s wind. If the wind changed then they wheeled together, without a breath in which for word to fly from ship to ship. The coordination was too smooth to be amazed by, but Elwing thought that Círdan’s fleet had never looked so to the gulls. Nor had it gleamed like frost in the field, small mariners rolling as black motes from bow to stern. How to credit motes with the driving forth of ships? though in the harbor they had been her own height, cheerful and brave; they clotted the rigging. They argued very cryptically, like an inventor to himself. But everywhere the world had a second face. Rising, she had not seen it turn over, but this must be its underside. Sailors were ash, the bay was wrinkled rock, and foam sprouted to mark where ships had wetted the dry sea.

Círdan’s fleet, too, had never been escorted by transparent giants. But Elwing paid no attention to the march of the Valar, in case one looked back.

Before the fleet set sail, at the farewell feast, Olwë the king had given her a round black crystal, rather ugly. “It will get you news of the war. Sight or sound of the Outer Lands is not forbidden you.” He said it with such certainty, she thought he had not asked, to learn if it were true. “This speaks to other _palantírs_. Finarfin my son will gladly share his tidings.” Later in the course of the meal, and without acknowledging a lull in their conversation, Olwë said, “When speaking to him you may find that the image is strange, the color good but the image warped. The _palantír_ s took time to perfect. Finarfin’s stone… Fëanor made him a present of it when Finarfin was young.”

She tried not to show discomfort, or much pity, when Olwë spoke of Fëanor and his sons. The sting was not in the names. She had grown accustomed to having her father’s murderers for kin: people who might yet die, who might be reasoned with and escaped—never forgiven. It was in his manner, thoughtless, dry, moderated by care for her but small care for himself, and yet not numb—as though five hundred years of the Sun had served just to hem in the pain with calm, and as though pain had neither destroyed nor restored the old, impatient, worn-out love; as though time could add and add without receiving back its treasures, and in that way run faster, having unburdened itself.

The feast had lasted the night and at dawn, after Eärendil’s departure, she lay awake. If she thought for a moment of Sirion, the pain stabbed deep into her belly; she would then spend hours or the day surrendering. But that at least was all. To her no stranger would come, saying, Here is _my_ pain, which gives me a claim on you.

Unless her sons returned. At that she laughed and fell asleep. _Unless my son, my son—_

Now she resolved to fly lower. She spread her wings very far, shoulder-bones almost knocking, the wind baled under her arms. The skin there felt a cool touch worst, spring like winter, winter like the sea.

She didn’t have the courage to dive when she spied her tower. She came down flapping, doubled up, and touched one foot to sand and knelt, wings thrown over herself like a cloak. The grass-furred dunes were safe enough to walk on, winged. She staggered a little under added weight; her long gray primaries traced furrows in the sand—but she could think. She did not want to fly further, only because blood had made her head and legs so heavy. The useless stammer of her pulse was like when birds had come to her, on these sacred shores, speaking with the old urgency, shouting as they had shouted when she fell.

So she had learned their tongue a second time. And if I forget, she said to herself, grimly, I will learn again.

Olwë’s people had built her tower of unfaced marble. The door had five bolts, because she had asked for a bolt. She had to have hands to work the door.

Up to her chamber. Vingilot! she cried, nearly aloud, on the stair. Vingilot! I will wait till he appears. Then when she had reached the top she thought she could not bear to wait so long. The deep blue in her window, and the white sun her only visitor. Well, and she had forgotten to set out bread. She did that. Then she spoke to gulls for an hour about the Valar’s preparations, the departing host, and especially their friends the Teleri, who had so unexpectedly and so graciously consented to captain the ships that would carry those fools, the spear-elves and the Noldor—some of whom had even been present for, or else had narrowly avoided fighting at, the Battle at Alqualondë!

“It is strange,” agreed Elwing, tearing out and eating a chunk of coarse bread herself. The rooms in the tower were made for sunset or the light of the Silmaril, that on every white surface laid the boughs of the two Trees; also they were made for music, and gulls’ talk fought the vaulted roof in a flat cacophony. Yet she loved the tower at other times. Cold at noon, the black shadows were a balm to her, much as were the wide sky or the shore. She was safe and safe. Sometimes she woke without sleeping, and sweat taped her dress to her back. A bandage that wanted changing—mortal wounds she could not find. On this afternoon she did not dream but, banishing the gulls, sat on the floor to resume work on a pennant for Vingilot, since the army had carried off their banners. The _palantír_ she took from its pedestal and set down on the end of the pennant, to anchor her work.

Then somehow, though she checked the sky often, dusk was underway. The design bloomed, unfinished. Elwing left her needle in the silk.

 

Vingilot's oars worked stiffly in air. Vingilot’s sails were not savaged by the winds that worked on Elwing; Vingilot seemed rather to feel that changeless wind which fills the moon’s trim crescent.

By a miscalculation she shot past the railing and had to alight, from above, on the bow.

“I don’t remember commissioning a figurehead,” said her husband. He planted a hand on her foot, but made no other move to steady her. “Who carved you?”

“I—I was a birch tree, in Doriath’s woods, and I have greatly fallen in station,” she said, trying not to laugh. Her wings beat time to the hiccups she suppressed.

Her husband frowned. His hand crept to her ankle. “You’ll have redress. This is the West. Yet whoever he was, he must have been a fair craftsman: and so, your legs… ah!” He fell away from the kick, coughing his laughter. Incensed, she hopped down to give chase.

They were busy while the ship, of her own genius, laid anchor like Arien in the sea; busy when fishermen came to fling sweet wreaths and shout, because without Eärendil to pilot it, the ship made port near a Teleri settlement, north of her tower. At last a pounding on the cabin door roused Eärendil, who woke her carefully, with a touch on the wrist—as though it mattered now if they made noise.

In their hurry she ended up in his tunic, while he went shirtless to the door. She had time to lace her sandals. Eärendil adjusted the Nauglamír from where it had slipped over one eye, and slid back the latch.

The fishermen carried her out and carried Eärendil out on their shoulders. They tossed him after her into the stinking dinghy, then jumped down themselves, with very little discussion. It was night faster than night had ever come in Sirion. The Silmaril paved the water with silver and gold.

Then on the pier they must all drink to the departed fleet, and weep for those who would come home from the Halls and not the sea. Someone lent Eärendil their black cloak, saying, wisely, that he must be chilled. Elwing ripped the meat from sweet shrimp cooked on the coals, and piled up shells in a gauzy heap, and drank sparingly. The headache from the feast was not quite cured, and it came and went with bright evenness, like it took what it was owed—just half of time. Eärendil, noticing her silence, offered her the Nauglamír. After a minimum of protest she let him transfer it to her neck; its weight sharpened the pain to a cruel point, then plucked it out, leaving a fuzzier, enduring warmth.

The Silmaril plastered the pier with fine snow. In the alcove of its light, smoke from the brazier hung as swandown, and the coals glowed almost pink.

“I have a brother,” said the man opposite Elwing, “who has a wife. She goes to fight. _He_ promised me he would not leave the ship. Do I believe him?”

“No,” said Eärendil, sounding apologetic. He had an arm over Elwing’s shoulder. “Your brother will wait till the horn is sounded and leap over the side. He’ll run through the foam and say to his lady, ‘I fell overboard!’“

“Do you get along with his wife?” Elwing asked.

She was drowsy and leaden, plagued by untouchable hunger. The absence of pain clasped her throat, scratching her with gold links. She wasn't drunk. But she had Eärendil by her, and the Silmaril on her breast. When the fishermen had had enough of their own clear liquor to make requests, she sang a canto of the Lay. Lúthien before Morgoth.

In eagerness she misplaced a verse, and told how Fingolfin rode over Dor-nu-Fauglith. “In overmastering wrath and hate…” but that was her grandmother, who wore the demon’s skin and flew. She could salvage that. She went from Fingolfin’s challenge to Lúthien’s lie, binding together two broken couplets.

At midnight the fishers went singing and rowing away to the cluster of huts on the headland. Elwing heard the enchantments of Lúthien fitted, first with caution, and then with increasing creativity, to a drinking song—though the words were archaic, to her ear. A tumbled version of Eärendil’s mother tongue.

She was listening with interest; and then she had jumped to her feet. Why did she have to go? She ran up the length of the pier to the beach, heard her footsteps, and ran faster. She would have taken flight if it had occurred to her, but the stars were out, and Eärendil ran behind her, so she had no wings. Her hair swung over her face. Ticklish, dyed muddy red by the jewel; suppose she lay hidden in a deep brake of reeds, while hunters made old music.

She fumbled at the Nauglamír’s chain.

Eärendil came and stopped her, and helped her. Throughout she could not tell him why she had to have it off: she could not be found, could not be caught with the light. She was its protector. Eärendil kept one hand on the side of her neck while she spoke. He gathered the Nauglamír idly in the other, like a torn scrap of mail.

“We should go back to the tower,” she said, losing the thread of her long explanation. “Olwë gave me a stone—you should see it. We can speak with the host. Not—Finarfin, right now, perhaps—but someone must stand watch.”

He said, “Would you like to fight?”

She tried to understand. Her panic had almost subsided, though it rose and fell with the hissing from the waves. Eärendil seemed sorry not to have made himself comprehensible; he took the corner of his mantle and draped it over the Silmaril, and the Silmaril, obedient, drew half its light out of the air. What was left had a shape. It flamed in pieces on her face. It made a prism of her lashes, radiant and alive. Eärendil put his other arm around her shoulders. He pressed his cheek to her cheek, and rubbed between her shoulderblades, away from where her wings would sprout. His fist with the stone he laid over her heart, as a friend seeking entry.

Finally he pulled away. He smiled at her in a way that meant he had solved his trouble, and yet doubted himself. But he looked at her longer and the smile disappeared, it became just the forgetful pleasure in a smile—happiness graven deeply on flat calm. He said, “What I do, you do. So do you want to fight?”

It was as though they had a secret language, which she had neglected to learn. It was like nothing he had ever said to her. Not when he left, or returned from his voyages, and not when he asked her to stay aboard the ship, lest she be killed.

Then she remembered. It was used by the twins. When they were separated by sickness, or a parent’s unreasonable whim: what I do, you do.

She and Eärendil were not clear of the tide. A wave crashed down, spray raining onto their heads. She could not think how to tell him he was ridiculous. (”Yes. Of course we will fight.”) She saw for the first time that in the future their lives would be better; she would have peace, or have it longer, and he would be less patiently afraid. She covered his hand with hers and tugged aside the mantle.

The darkness, with the roar of the sea all around them. The Silmaril whitened her chest from inside a ring of red. Red for a warning—she liked that the Silmaril still flashed its warnings. Any word to steer by, in this unending storm.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] all they had to lend](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12018291) by [Chestnut_filly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chestnut_filly/pseuds/Chestnut_filly)




End file.
